Assignment:
Reading the following chapter are given below is:
The Development of the Juvenlie Courts
Child savers: A group of reformers, mostly well-educated, middle-class Protestant women of Anglo-Saxon descent, who had the time and resources to fight for improved conditions for delinquent youths in jails and reformatories and who eventually played an important role in the creation of the juvenile courts. On the positive side, their work led to wider acceptance of adolescence as an important developmental stage of life, and they correctly believed that the adult criminal justice system was harmful to children or at best ineffective. On the negative side, their conservative ideas on the family and their ‘noblesse oblige' attitude toward the poor resulted in reforms that focused more on the social control of children and the protection of the interests of the wealthy than on attacking the underlying causes of problem youth behaviors."
React to this. Is it good, bad, or somewhere in between?
I think, from my experience, some of these attitudes persist today in the juvenile system. Discuss some examples of these attitudes and how you see that attitude being carried out today.
The text also refers to the police as having the role of the "gatekeepers of the juvenile system". What does that idea encompass and is it a "fair" urden to place on police?